Greek Alternate Finance Minister Theodoros Skylakakis submitted a request to the European Commission for additional loan financing resources from the Recovery and Resilience Facility, amounting to 5 billion euros, in the context of REPowerEU.
REPowerEU is the European Commission’s plan to make Europe independent of Russian fossil fuels well before 2030, in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is a plan for energy saving, the production of clean energy, and the diversification of the Greek energy sources.
The 5 billion euros will be used, primarily, for the financing of private investments in energy, both through loans and venture capital, which will is related to renewable energy projects, namely solar and wind energy, biomethane, green hydrogen; energy efficiency projects such as interventions in existing business buildings, upgrading infrastructure and increasing the efficiency of production processes; initiatives to promote clean transport; clean energy access projects such as off-grid solutions and distributed electricity networks and battery energy storage systems (BESS).
The Ministry said there is a high interest from investors, as the loans are granted on extremely favorable terms (borrowing rate, fixed 0.35 % for very small and small enterprises and 1 % for medium and large ones).